Asteroid Vesta's 'Rainbow' Ingredients Shine in New Image

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The asteroid Vesta's many flavors are revealed in a new
rainbow-colored image taken by a NASA probe in orbit around the
space rock.

The new image of Vesta's southern hemisphere, snapped by
NASA's Dawn spacecraft, uncovers a diverse world with many
ingredients and well-separated layers. According to scientists,
the images support the notion that Vesta is a so-called
protoplanet that would have continued to develop into a rocky
body like Earth or Mars if Jupiter's gravity had not perturbed
the asteroid belt long ago.

" Vesta's
iron core makes it special and more like terrestrial planets
than a garden-variety asteroid," Carol Raymond, Dawn's deputy
principal investigator at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in
Pasadena, Calif., said in a statement.

The colors in the image were assigned by scientists to illustrate
the different rock and mineral types. The varied compositions
represent material ejected by impacts and geologic processes that
have shaped the asteroid's surface. The black circle in the
center is data that have been omitted due to the unfavorable
angle between Dawn, Vesta and the sun, NASA officials said.

Images from Dawn's visible and infrared instruments reveal that
Vesta's surface contains the iron-bearing mineral pyroxene and a
mixture of rapidly cooled surface rocks and a deeper layer that
cooled more slowly. The different materials seen in this image
correspond to topographic variations that were previously seen by
Dawn. These observations of
Vesta's rugged surface indicate a layered structure that has
been excavated by impacts, the scientists said.

"The distinct compositional variation and layering we see at
Vesta appear to derive from internal melting of the body shortly
after formation, which separated Vesta into crust, mantle and
core," Raymond said.

The AGU presentation also included new video footage exploring a
hill on Vesta that appears to be made up of a darker material
than the rest of the asteroid's crust. The movie was created by
David O'Brien of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Ariz.

Vesta measures 330 miles (530 km) across, and is the
second-most-massive object in the asteroid belt between Mars and
Jupiter.

The $466-million Dawn spacecraft launched in September 2007 and
arrived at Vesta on July 15, 2011. The probe will study Vesta for
a year before departing in July 2012 for the asteroid Ceres, the
largest body in the main asteroid belt.

Ceres spans approximately 590 miles (950 km) across and is so
large that it is considered to be a dwarf planet. Dawn is
expected to arrive at Ceres in 2015.

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